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Why Do You Exist?

Don’t look to the sky and gods for answers. It lies deeper.

For over 300,000 years we’ve looked to the sky and gods for answers. We invented fire, landed on the moon, and even flung a piece of metal outside the solar system. But despite the development of super-proton-antiproton-synchrotrons, and now, superconducting-supercolliders that contain enough niobium-titanium wire to circle the earth sixteen times, we have no more of an understanding of why we exist than the first thinkers of civilized consciousness. Where did it all come from? Why are we here?

We’re like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” who went on a long journey in search of the Wizard to get back home, only to find the answer was inside her all along. The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the secret of life and existence can’t be found by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.

We’ve looked at the world for so long that we no longer challenge its reality. Here is the Universe: our sense organs perceive atoms and galaxies to some 14 billion light-years, although we can’t see with the eye of reason, that the world is for us merely a bundle of sensations unified by laws which exist in our understanding. We can’t see the laws that uphold the world; and that if they be removed, the trees and the mountains, indeed the whole Universe, would collapse to nothing.

“We are too content with our sense organs,” Loren Eiseley once said. “It’s no longer enough to see as a man sees — even to the ends of the universe.” Our radiotelescopes and supercolliders merely extend the perceptions of our mind. We see the finished work only. In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality — to a dandelion in a meadow, or a seed pod, or the sun or wind or rain. Anyway, it’s impressive, and your cat or dog can do it, too. And perhaps even the spider, there on her web, moored outside my window.

We’re more than we’ve been taught in biology class. We’re not just a collection of atoms — proteins and molecules — spinning like planets around the sun. It’s true that the laws of chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, and as a medical doctor I can recite in detail the chemical foundations and cellular organization of animal cells: oxidation, biophysical metabolism, all the carbohydrates, lipids and amino acid patterns. But there’s more to us than the sum of our biochemical functions. A full understanding of life can’t be found only by looking at cells and molecules. Conversely, physical existence can’t be divorced from the animal structures that coordinate sense perception and experience (even if they, too, have a physical correlate in our consciousness).

It seems likely that we’re the center of our own sphere of physical reality, connected to the rest of life not only by being alive at the same moment in the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, but by something suggestive — a pattern that’s a template for existence itself.

Science has failed to recognize those properties of life that make it fundamental to our existence. This view of the world in which life and consciousness are bottom-line in understanding the larger universe — biocentrism — revolves around the way our consciousness relates to a physical process. It’s a vast mystery that I’ve pursued my entire life with a lot of help along the way, standing on the shoulders of some of the most lauded minds of the modern age. I’ve also come to conclusions that would shock my predecessors, placing biology above the other sciences in an attempt to find the theory of everything that has evaded other disciplines.

We’re taught since childhood that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities — ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical. “Self” is commonly defined by what we can control. We can move our fingers but I can’t wiggle your toes. The dichotomy is based largely on manipulation, even if basic biology tells us we’ve no more control over most of the trillions of cells in our body than over a rock or a tree.

Consider everything that you see around you right now — this page, for example, or your hands and fingers. Language and custom say that it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet we can’t see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds our brain. Everything you see and experience — your body, the trees and sky — are part of an active process occurring in your mind. You are this process, not just that tiny part you control with motor neurons.

According to biocentrism, you’re not an object — you’re your consciousness. You’re a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes all the colors, sensations and objects you perceive. If you divorce one side of the equation from the other, you cease to exist. Indeed, experiments confirm that particles only exist with real properties if they’re observed. As the great physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word “black hole”) said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” That’s why in real experiments, the properties of matter — and space and time themselves — depend on the observer. Your consciousness isn’t just part of the equation — the equation is you.

Even Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, concedes that there’s a problem with consciousness, and that despite the power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness doesn’t seem derivable from physical laws.

“It will remain remarkable,” said Nobelist Eugene Wigner, who helped lay the foundations for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics “in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.”

The answer to life and the universe can’t be found by looking through a telescope or examining the finches of the Galapagos. It lies much deeper. Our consciousness is the key to their existence, to space and time, and to the laws of nature itself. Our consciousness unifies the thinking and extended worlds into a coherent experience that creates the music — our emotions, the purposes, the good and the bad. It doesn’t load the dice for you to play the game of life. True, there’s pain and strife everywhere. But as Will Durant pointed out, we need to see “behind the strife, the friendly aid of neighbors, the rollicking joy of children and young men, the dances of vivacious girls, the willing sacrifices of parents and lovers, the patient bounty of the soil, and the renaissance of spring.”

In whatever form it takes, life sings because it has a song. The meaning is in the lyrics.

Further Reading

"Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence."
—Deepak Chopra

"Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us."
—Corey Powell, ex editor-in-chief, Discover magazine

"Will machines ever achieve consciousness? Are plants aware? Is death an illusion? These are some of the big questions tackled in Beyond Biocentrism, which serves up a new, biology-based theory of everything that is as delightful to read as it is fascinating."
—Pamela Weintraub, ex editor-in-chief of OMNI Magazine

Biocentrism takes you on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter your ideas of life-time and space, and even death…you will never see reality the same again.

"Like "A Brief History of Time" it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think."
—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Lanza featured on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC’s) Ideas, one of the oldest and most respected radio programs in the world

BEYOND BIOCENTRISM: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of DeathHost Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.

Lanza’s Paper is the Cover Story of Annalen der Physik, which Published Einstein’s Theories of Relativity

In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. This new paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer creates it. The paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our everyday world. Instead, it’s necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.

Dr. Robert Lanza selected for the 2014 TIME 100 list of the hundred most influential people in the world, along with Beyoncé, Hillary Clinton, Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, Robert Redford, and other artists, pioneers, leaders, titans and icons.

Biocentrism Author, Robert Lanza Named One of the Top 50 “World Thinkers”

Robert Lanza selected as one of the top “World Thinkers 2015” by Prospect Magazine. The thinkers were chosen for “engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today,” as well as for their continuing significance for “this year’s biggest questions” (in economics, science, philosophy, cultural and social criticism and in politics).

From Wikipedia: The h-index measures both the productivity and impact of a scientist or scholar. A value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. According to Hirsch (who put forward the h-index), an h index of 20 is good, 40 is outstanding, and 60 is truly exceptional.

How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Don’t miss the book that started it all, and shocked the world with its radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

In biocentrism, Robert Lanza and Bob Berman team up to turn the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe‒our own‒from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. It will shatter the reader’s ideas of life-time and space, and even death … the reader will never see reality the same again.

“Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work… Most importantly, it makes you think.”—Nobel Prize Winner E. Donnall Thomas

Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

Biocentrism shocked the world with a radical rethinking of the nature of reality.

But that was just the beginning.

“Beyond Biocentrism is an enlightening and fascinating journey that will forever alter your understanding of your own existence.”—Deepak Chopra

“Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us.”—Corey S. Powell, former editor-in-chief, Discover magazine

Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce Biocentrism, a revolutionary new view of the universe.

Every now and then a simple yet radical idea shakes the very foundations of knowledge. The startling discovery that the world was not flat challenged and ultimately changed the way people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. For most humans of the 15th century, the notion of Earth as ball of rock was nonsense. The whole of Western, natural philosophy is undergoing a sea change again, increasingly being forced upon us by the experimental findings of quantum theory, and at the same time, towards doubt and uncertainty in the physical explanations of the universe’s genesis and structure. Biocentrism completes this shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down again with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

In this paradigm, life is not an accidental byproduct of the laws of physics. Biocentrism takes the reader on a seemingly improbable but ultimately inescapable journey through a foreign universe—our own—from the viewpoints of an acclaimed biologist and a leading astronomer. Switching perspective from physics to biology unlocks the cages in which Western science has unwittingly managed to confine itself. Biocentrism will shatter the reader’s ideas of life—time and space, and even death. At the same time it will release us from the dull worldview of life being merely the activity of an admixture of carbon and a few other elements; it suggests the exhilarating possibility that life is fundamentally immortal.

The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science with a simple idea discovered by one of the leading life-scientists of our age. Biocentrism awakens in readers a new sense of possibility, and is full of so many shocking new perspectives that the reader will never see reality the same way again.

Robert Lanza Worked (and Published Scientific Papers) with Some of the Greatest Scientists of the 20th Century

“I downloaded a digital copy of [biocentrism] in the privacy of my home, where no one could observe my buying or reading such a “New Agey” sort of cosmology book. Now, mind you, my motivation was not all that pure. It was my intention to read the book so I could more effectively refute it like a dedicated physicist was expected to…The book had the completely opposite effect on me. The views that Dr. Lanza presented in this book changed my thinking in ways from which there could never be retreat. Before I had actually finished reading the book, it was abundantly obvious to me that Dr. Lanza’s writings provided me with the pieces of perspective that I had been desperately seeking. Everything I had learned and everything I thought I knew just exploded in my mind and, as possibilities first erupted and then settled down, a completely new understanding emerged. The information I had accumulated in my mind hadn’t changed, but the way I viewed it did –in a really big way.”

— Scott M. Tyson, Physicist, The Unobservable Universe

“The heart of [biocentrism], collectively, is correct. On page 15 they say “the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.” That is the essence of the entire book, and that is factually correct. It is an elementary conclusion from quantum mechanics. So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it—or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private—furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no! Bless Robert Lanza for creating this book, and bless Bob Berman for not dissuading friend Robert from going ahead with it. Not that I think Robert Lanza could be dissuaded–this dude doesn’t dissuade! Lanza’s remarkable personal story is woven into the book, and is uplifting. You should enjoy this book, and it should help you on your personal journey to understanding.

“Having interviewed some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific world, I found Dr. Robert Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting. His theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient traditions of the world which say that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world. It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence…I agree more with [Lanza] than with anyone else that I have ever met.”

— Deepak Chopra, Bestselling Author (heralded by Time magazine as one of the top heroes and icons of the century)